Many years ago (around year 2000), I first encountered wiki and decided it wasn't for me. The effort involved in setting up a wiki was simply more than it was worth. Add to that the page formatting was esoteric, difficult to remember, and almost as much of a pain to use as html... needless to say, I got really turned off of the whole concept. Sure, I'd read them a lot, but set up my own and use it? Not for me.

Recently, I needed to do some documentation, which I wanted to make it easy for others to collaborate on, and decided to try and give wiki a try again. Steeling my resolve, I did some googling and ended up with Wikka. Installation was a breeze, just an upload and a table away. Literally, within minutes, I was playing around with the thing. A few minutes later, I was experimenting with the code repository. Those were pretty easy too (though why no one uses the file-name option for the code block I don't understand).

I experimented with a few other wikis, but I kept coming back to wikka. It may not have the maturity of, say, mediawiki. But wikka has some serious strengths. Easy to install. A small core (which makes for a quick upload). It's small and user-friendly enough to easily plunk on a webhost.

And that documentation project exploded to six wikkas installed on my webhost, hundreds of pages, including a trunk install, in less than a week.

I'd say it's good stuff.

--michael